Hard Drive Recovery
 

If there's one place with experience dealing with recovering data from crashed hard drives, it's GFF.

The hard drive for the research lab computer at school recently failed, and it had a ton of important data and experiments on it that my professor hadn't backed up. I never saw it, but he says it brought up a message about corrupted system files when he tried to boot it up. Rather than trying to fix it he just called IT, and they obviously made no attempt to recover data. All we got back was a note saying that the HDD had been "re-imaged."

So, is there any way to get at least some of this stuff back? I've seen programs for this sort of thing tossed around in the past, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

They re-imaged it? Hah, completely wiped clean.

Toss "GetDataBack" on it and see what happens.

Well, more specifically someone from OCR had experience with recovering data from crashed hard drives and walked GFF through it. From what I can tell, she usually recommends R-Studio.

But if IT just stuck a new image on the drive, you might be SOL, since I'm guessing that would overwrite pretty much everything.

I wouldn't trust that drive anyway. To me this sounds like IT returned the same drive to you, right?

Why did the filesystem became corrupted in the first place? I highly doubt they even checked that...

Filesystems don't become corrupted because of nothing - there has to be a cause. And if this cause is still there, it will fail on you again... and again.

So I advice to pester IT until you get a fresh drive. Write down the drive serial and don't stop bothering them until you get a different one. I find it very irresponsible that possibly broken hardware is just "zeroed" and returned back to the person which turned it in - especially since it's a harddrive and data is valuable...

That was our thought too, but the professor doesn't want to piss off the IT guys since he's currently on good terms with them and they're pretty tempermental. They just flat out refused to do things for the last professor I worked with, so I can see why he's worried about that.

My professor would seriously kick some ass if our IT refused to do things. He needs a new system, he gets it. System gets broken, they fix it. It's just as simple as that.

And that's what IT is for. It's not hanging out in the IT team office and killing time with quake3....

I think something is going seriously wrong at your university Tritoch ;)

EDIT: To give a good example of "kick some ass". There was this guy who thought he could slack and ignore some of his work. Complain got filed and the guy's contract didn't get renewed - plus an annotation to never ever again give him a job in the IT team.

Too bad that doesn't always work. We had a perfectly decent IT guy working in my office, but then EPA decided to streamline and go with a different contractor. These idiots are in charge of rolling out new PCs to everyone in Research and Development, and they have no clue what they're doing. Everyone I've spoken to has had some sort of problems (they didn't know how to map a network printer in my case), and they even screwed up the big boss' computer. As far as I know, he had a hand in setting up their contract, but they're all still gainfully employed with the EPA. It all comes down to who bids the lowest for the IT contract, which I suspect would be the case at Tritoch's college as well (or it's like the IT Crowd, and everyone is mystified by what they do).

If IT is / are hired individuals, tell them they already have a strike against them. Have it written out and say after two more they will be terminated. Furthermore, keep close tabs on them so they don't try anything funny. I mean, I am fairly positive a university can hire other individuals who will be THANKFUL to have their job thus having good service minus the attitude, especially with the economy as it is.

If it's a company, then file a complaint through the company regarding said individuals. I am fairly certain that if an IT company's crew isn't doing what they should, that would easily be terms to void a contract. One could look for alternatives during this. Granted, people want to get the lowest price in this economy that they can, but on the flip side, companies want to get as much business as they can.